Orwell's essay on "Politics and the English Language" is among my most oft-cited pieces on language and writing, and its lessons and criticisms are as valid today as they were in 1946.
Reflections on the Performative Nature of Language
When we consider the organic and evolving nature of language, it becomes clear that the medium in which we as writers work is at once both a static means of information storage, and a dynamic, independent artform allowing the author to engage in a unique interaction with each reader.
Linguistic Reference Frames
I came across a paper in Science Advances called "Different reference frames on different axes: Space and language in indigenous Amazonians."
Words We Don’t Have
The possibilities of leveraging this idea to render fictional characters and cultures more unique, more interesting, more textured, more genuine, more true, more alive, are veritably endless.
Autocomplete Your Story
Now, tools that leverage artificial intelligence can predict entire paragraphs of writing, rewrite your paper for you, and may one day do the first draft, too.
Definition, Connotation, and the Function of Language
A long time ago, there were no dictionaries, no modern language associations, no Oxford standards. Language is a fundamentally organic system that has been evolving for thousands of years, as complex and intricate as something like the economy, and for most of its existence its rules have not been explicit.
Fewer Words, Longer Books
rigorous, quantitative analyses to confirm the trend, so what I really have is a suspicion based on inference, internal logic, and anecdotal evidence; however, it struck me as a sufficiently interesting observation that I should desire to share it with you. The trend is this: the English language is losing words (ironic, considering our post about word creation), and is using more of them to compensate.
Origins of Language Article
This is just a quick post to share an article across which I recently came. It was published in the Wall Street Journal, and since we often discuss linguistics in our posts it seemed worth sharing.
A Very Bad Terrible Part of Speech
inspires strong opinions. Most people, and even many authors, use rules of grammar and understanding of grammar as best practices that help enable clarity of communication. Some people, like me, get a little too fixated on the rules of grammar, like avoiding dangling prepositions. The outlier is a particular part of speech that many people, and not just those who wield the pen on a regular basis, apparently love to hate: adverbs.
Make Anachronisms a Thing of the Past
I don't actually know how much this post will help you in ridding your works of pesky anachronisms, but the title just seemed to clever to resist. If you're not already familiar, an anachronism is a literary, spatial or temporal (usually temporal) transplant. A detail, a phrase, an expression, a device, or really anything else could be an anachronism; most commonly these are stock expressions or devices of our own time that we accidentally put into our works. Nor are they unique to literature, as there are plenty of examples in movies and other media. For instance, perhaps a period movie might show cars from a later model year driving around in the background. Or my personal favorite, when an author or screenwriter has archers "fire" their arrows, an expression which could not predate the advent of firearms. This last one even made its way into The Lord of the Rings movies (notably during the battle at Helm's Deep).
IGC Publishing 